La Casa: The House
Welcome to the first lesson in the About.com Spanish Language online course. Whether you're just starting to learn the language or refreshing your memory, you're welcome participate in this course.| Read, listen and learn in the About.com
virtual Spanish classroom:
1. You're free to join the class at any time and study on your own schedule. For textbook and other organizational information, see the class introduction. 2. Listen to a brief spoken version of this lesson, which includes the pronunciation of many of the words in the text. With most computer configurations, clicking on the above link will download and/or play an MP3 sound file. If you need software for playing MP3 files, see the About.com MP3 Music site. The sound file (453 KB) may take several minutes to download unless you have a high-speed connection. 3. To ask questions, the best way is to post them on the About.com Spanish Language bulletin board. 4. Feel free to email the instructor, although answers to questions of interest to others in the class will probably be posted on the bulletin board rather than be sent individually. |
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If you haven't done so already, be sure to read the class introduction. There you will find out more about this course, including the class goals and the recommended textbook.
Assignment
First of all, read through the pronunciation guide on page xi. It isn't necessary to memorize all the pronunciations now, but you should try to follow the guide in pronouncing the words out loud. If you can, listen to the audio accompanying this lesson.Next, complete Preparatory Lesson 1 on pages xiv and xv of the textbook. The lessons are designed to be self-explanatory. In this case, however, the authors have left out one fact that you'll need to know — the Spanish word for "yes" is "sí."
Finally, to review some of these words, go to one of the Spanish search engines and type in any of the new words you have learned. See if you can find Web sites that relate to those words.
Background
Although this is a preparatory lesson and doesn't go into much detail, it introduces one of the basic concepts of Spanish grammar: the definite article. As you will learn later, Spanish has four words that can be translated as "the." In Spanish, unlike English, the definite article (the grammatical term for "the") must match the noun it goes with in both number and gender. We'll learn more about that later, but suffice it to say for now that nouns in Spanish can be either singular or plural, masculine or feminine.In this case, the word el goes with singular, masculine nouns, while la goes with singular, feminine nouns.
You will also notice in this lesson that questions begin with an inverted question mark. Also, some vowels have accents on them. These accents usually are an aid to pronunciation, although the sometimes are used to help indicate a word's meaning.
Pronunciation tip
In Spanish, the L is always pronounced approximately like the "l" in the English words "love," "leap," and "lizard." It is never pronounced like the "l" in words such as "all," "bill," and "bell." Thus el should sound something like the first syllable of "eligible" rather than like "fell" without the "f." Listen to the sound (see box above for information on sound files).La is pronounced about the same as it is in English.
Coming up:
In the next lesson we will take a preliminary look at the indefinite, singular articles. Those are the words that usually would be translated in English as "a" and "an."
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